Hi, welcome back to the Photoshop training channel dot com,
I'm Jesús Ramirez.
In this video,
I'm going to show you how to create golden metal objects from your photos in Photoshop.
This technique will utilize the “apply image” command and it will help you create that metallic
chrome look on your photos.
This technique could be used to create metallic statues, like trophies,
you could also create jewelry, all sorts of fun things.
This is going to be a very easy to follow tutorial,
I'm going to go very slow, so no worries if you're not familiar with Photoshop.
Why don't we jump right into the tutorial.
This is the image that I'm going to work with.
You can follow along with any image or you can download this file from Adobe Stock,
I'll place a link to it down below in the description.
The first step is to duplicate the layer,
because this will be a destructive effect which means we won't be able to come back
to the original.
So, I'm going to duplicate it by pressing Control and J on Windows,
Command and J on the Mac.
Then I'll rename this duplicate copy,
I'll call it Chrome because it will have a chrome effect.
The next step is to extract the foreground from the background, so we want to hide the
background.
I'm going to disable the background layer so that we're just working with this chrome layer,
and you can go into Window, Properties to make sure you have the Properties panel enabled.
Then under Quick Actions,
you can click on remove background.
This action uses Adobe Sensei which is Adobe's Artificial Intelligence to find the main subject
of the image, select it and apply a layer mask,
and it does a really good job in this case as you can see.
The mask is not perfect, for example if I select the Zoom tool,
I can zoom into his fingers here,
and it missed a couple areas but we can easily remove those areas by selecting the Brush
tool and making sure that black is our foreground color.
With the layer mask selected,
I can paint with black and I can hide those pixels.
So I recommend that you spend time on your image, fixing these imperfections,
I'm not going to spend the time on this tutorial just to save a little bit of time, but the
technique will still work,
and it will look very good.
So, I'm going to double click on the Hand tool to fit the image to screen,
and now it's time to create that metal effect.
And all you need to do is click on the Layer thumbnail
so that you have that selected, the focus or white outline is on the layer,
not the layer mask.
Then go into Image, Adjustments, Desaturate,
and this going to take all the color away from the image.
The next step is to remove the detail from the photo.
If I select the Zoom tool and use zoom in,
you're going to see a lot of the hair on his body,
a lot of the detail on the shirt so we don't really want that,
that's not necessarily how a chrome statue would look.
He also has facial hair so we really need to smooth that out.
And we're going to use a Camera Raw filter for that.
If you go into Filter, Camera, Raw Filter,
you can zoom into the image so you can see what you're doing,
and I'll zoom into this area here,
and you can start by going down in the basic adjustments
and reducing the texture all the way down.
If you click on this icon,
you can see the original settings,
and what the image looks like after we adjusted it.
So it's smooths it out a little bit.
You can also go into the Detail panel,
and from here you can just increase the luminance all the way,
and notice how it smooths out the image.
You can also adjust the luminance detail to smooth it more,
choice is up to you.
Maybe something like this,
In this case,
and you can increase the luminance contrast.
Again I'll click on this icon so you can see the before and the after so it's much,
much smoother and this is going to work much better for that chrome effect that we're going for.
I'll double click on the Hand tool to fit the image to screen.
Now we'll apply the chrome effect by applying this image onto itself using the Difference mode.
Let me show you how to do that.
If you go into Image, Apply Image,
and the Apply Image window, make sure that you select "Merge" for Layer,
Channel, RGB, Blending mode, change that over into Difference.
This is going to make a silhouette and that's okay.
All you need to do is check Invert and you can see that
Photoshop has now created this chrome looking effect which looks fantastic.
Press OK,
and to further enhance the effect I'm going to do it one more time.
So Image, Apply Image,
and Photoshop remembers the settings, all you need to do is press Okay.
If there's an area that you think needs more work,
all you need to do is select the Lasso tool for example,
If this arm needed more work I could click and drag a selection around the arm,
and I could do the same command but just on the arm.
So Image, Apply Image,
and you can see the result there.
You can click on the preview checkbox to see the before,
and the after.
Or you can press the P key on the keyboard, any preview checkbox in Photoshop can be enabled
or disabled by pressing the P key.
When you're done, just press Okay.
So you can selectively target areas to apply this chrome effect.
The image is looking very good now.
If your image doesn't look quite like mine does,
make sure that you've run the filter maybe one more time,
or to specific areas to try to make it look more metal,
to give it more of that chrome look.
Also, keep in mind that if your image is very flat,
It probably won't be able to generate the same effect.
So you do need images that have strong shadows and highlights so you can invert them to create
that metal chrome look.
But keep adjusting it and you should be able to get something that looks close to this.
Just so that we can see the image better,
I'm going to create a solid color adjustment layer,
make it a dark gray and I will place it below the chrome layer, that way we can better see it.
Next, I'm going to click on the chrome layer,
and then select the Hue and Saturation adjustment layer.
I'm going to click on this icon to clip the human saturation adjustment layer to the layer below,
so that the adjustments that I make, only effect the chrome layer,
and nothing else.
Then, I'm going to click on Colorize to apply a color to this layer,
and with the hue I can select what color to apply.
So I'm just going to drag the slider over into the golds here,
and increase the saturation so we can get this gold effect.
And you can always adjust it so that you can get the result that you want.
This is before, and after.
The image is looking much, much better.
Also, I'm going to zoom in so that you can see that not all the detail is gone from the photo,
If you want to further smooth the image by once again selecting the chrome layer,
make sure that the layer thumbnail is selected and go into Filter, Camera Raw, Filter.
From here, you can once again zoom in so you can see what you're doing
and you can bring down the
texture once again,
and go into the detail panel and increase the Noise Reduction Luminance
to smooth out the image even further.
So before, and after.
It's totally up to you how far you want to smooth this image.
I'll double click on the hand tool to fit the image to screen,
and I'm going to add one more adjustment to this layer to further enhance it.
I'll double click to the side of the chrome layer, to bring out the Layer Style window,
and from here I can add an inner shadow.
Then I'm going to click on the color picker,
and I'll select one of the shadows that's already in the design so maybe like one of
these dark golden colors.
I'll press OK,
and I can increase the size of my shadow and the opacity like so.
In this case I'll just increase it to 100%,
and maybe bring down the opacity, so that's before,
and after.
I'll press okay,
and obviously you can keep adding any type of layer style that you like to further enhance
your image.
And this is my final result,
I recommend that you try this technique out with different objects, man-made objects will
probably work best.
Things like headphones, shoes, glasses and things like that.
So try them out and if you create something using this technique,
make sure that you post it onto Instagram with the hashtag PTCVIDS,
I would love to see what you come up with.
Also, the Photoshop training channel has a brand-new Instagram account at Photoshop Training
Channel.
If you want to follow me I'm at JR from PTC,
and of course if this is your first time at the Photoshop Training Channel,
don't forget to click on that subscribe and notification buttons.
Thank you so much for watching,
I'll talk to you again in the next Photoshop tutorial.